Culture Night 2011 Comes to the James Hardiman Library

For Culture Night 2011, the James Hardiman Library at NUI Galway will be opening up and exploring their unique literary, theatre and landed estates archives.

To mark the first involvement of NUI Galway Archives and Special Collections in Culture Night we are delighted to put on a programme of events that will share these wonderful archival collections.

At 7pm Special Collections Librarians Marie Boran and Brigid Clesham will talk about their new project, the Irish Landed Estates Database, an incredible resource for those interested in tracing their family history or looking at the history of the landed estates of Ireland.

At 8pm, Fergus Fahey, Institutional Repository and Digitisation Librarian, will discuss the personal archive of writer John McGahern. Having catalogued the McGahern Archive, Fahy will deliver a detailed and insightful overview of this wonderful collection of hand-written novels, drafts, stories and correspondence, created over a lifetime’s work by one of Ireland’s most celebrated and intriguing writers.

The evening will be topped off at 9pm by screenings from the award-winning DruidSynge series. Described by The Irish Times, as “one of the greatest achievements in the history of Irish Theatre”, Galway’s Druid Theatre undertook the mammoth task of staging all works of playwright J.M. Synge. Here, you can enjoy two of these works, Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen.

All events are taking place in the Patrick Fottrell Theatre, Arts Millennium Building, NUI Galway, next to the James Hardiman Library. A free shuttle bus service will be available on the night to bring guests to and from Culture Night venues. For more information and updates on the NUI Galway Archives and Special Collections programme for Culture Night, contact barry.houlihan@nuigalway.ie, follow on Twitter: @nuigarchives , Theatre Archives blog http://nuigarchives.blogspot.com/ or go to our homepage http://www.library.nuigalway.ie/